This half-day workshop is meant to be an opportunity to introduce the iSchool concept to a wider audience and to seek collaborations and contributions from interested institutions across geographical regions. In particular, several universities in the Asia Pacific have recently formed the CiSAP consortium with the objectives to promote the establishment and development of iSchools in the region, as well as to foster collaboration and exchange of ideas for education and research. iSchools in North America, on the other hand, under the flag of iCaucus, have been organizing an annual iSchool conference series to facilitate collaboration among their members.

In this workshop, we aim to foster the development of a global iSchool community by inviting CiSAP and iCaucus member institutions to showcase their academic programs, and research strengths/interests so as to allow them to identify areas of possible collaboration. It is hoped that collaborations between CiSAP and iCaucus can be used as a platform for (a) negotiating with funding agencies, (b) attracting and pooling funding and resources from various agencies, including national funding agencies like the national libraries and the national archives in Asia Pacific countries, international bodies (e.g., ASEAN, UNESCO, Asia: NZ, etc.) and multi-national corporations (e.g., Microsoft, Yahoo!, Google), and (c) influencing policies and funding strategies at the national and regional levels.

The workshop will also create an opportunity to outline the issues unique to the Asia Pacific region and its 'iSchools' and community, how CiSAP would address these in its mission and objectives and how CiSAP could leverage the experience from iCaucus, especially in positioning and branding of iSchools in the Asia Pacific region.

Chern Li Liewis a senior lecturer in the School of Information Management, Victoria University of Wellington (VUW).Chern Li's academic background includes a first class honors degree in library and information studies from the University of Brighton, a M.Sc. in information studies from Loughborough University and a Ph.D. from Nanyang Techonological University. Her research interests include the design and usability of digital libraries, digital cultural heritage, context-sensitive information seeking and knowledge discovery, and social informatics.She has published in these areas in international refereed journals such as Journal of Documentation, Journal of the American Society for Information Science & Technology, Journal of Information Science and Online Information Review. She is on the editorial advisory boards of International Journal of Digital Library Systems, Library and Information Science Research and Online Information Review.

Ronald L. Larsen, School of Information Sciences, University of Pittsburgh

Ronald L. Larsen is a professor and dean of the School of Information Sciences (SIS) at the University of Pittsburgh.He has led a number of studies for the U.S. National Science Foundation, helping to develop research priorities in digital libraries and information management. During the late 1990’s, Ron was the assistant director of the Information Technology Office at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), where he led research programs in digital libraries, information management, and cross-lingual information utilization, with particular emphases on interoperability and the development of performance metrics for large scale distributed information systems. He received a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Maryland in 1981, a M.S. in applied physics from the Catholic University of America in 1972, and a B.S. in engineering sciences from Purdue University in 1968. He served as general chair for the Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL) in 2008.

Edie Rasmussen, School of Library, Archival and Information Studies, University of British Columbia

Edie Rasmussen is currently a Professor in the School of Library, Archival and Information Studies at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada. Prior to joining UBC she was a Professor in the School of Information Sciences, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, USA. She has also held appointments at the School of Library and Information Studies at Dalhousie University, Nova Scotia, Canada, the School of Library Science at the Institiut Teknoloji MARA, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and visiting positions at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore and Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. Dr. Rasmussen has been active in the Information Retrieval and Digital Library research communities, serving as a Chair for the ACM SIGIR, ACM DL, ACM/IEE JCDL, and ASIS&T conferences. She served as President of the American Society for Information Science & Technology, President of the Canadian Council of Information Studies/Conseil Canadien des science de l’information, and Co-convenor of the Council of Deans and Directors of the Association for Library and Information Science Education.. Her current research interests include indexing and information retrieval in text and multimedia databases and digital libraries. She is currently on a year of leave, visiting academic institutions in Norway, Abu Dhabi, Singapore ,Australia and New Zealand.

Ee-Peng Lim, School of Information Systems, Singapore Management University

Ee-Peng Lim is currently a professor at the School of Information Systems of the Singapore Management University (SMU).He received Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis in 1994 and B.Sc. in Computer Science from National University of Singapore.His research interests include social network/web mining, information integration, and digital libraries.He is the principal investigator and co-PI of several research projects funded by A*Star, National Research Foundation (NRF) of Singapore, and DSO National Labs.He is currently an Associate Editor of the ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS), Information Processing and Management (IPM), Journal of Web Engineering (JWE), IEEE Intelligent Systems, International Journal of Digital Libraries (IJDL) and International Journal of Data Warehousing and Mining (IJDWM).He is a member of the ACM Publications Board.He was the Chair of the Steering Committee of the International Conference on Asian Digital Libraries (ICADL) from 2006 to 2008, and remains to be a member of the committee till now.He is also a member of the Steering Committee of the Pacific Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (PAKDD).

Nisachol Chamnongsri, School of Information Technology, Institute of Social Technology, Suranaree University of Technology, Thailand

Nisachol Chamnongsri just got her Ph.D. in Information studies from Khon Kaen University, Thailand in 2009. She received MA and BA in Library and Information Science from Thammasat University and Khon Kaen University. She is currently a fulltime faculty at School of Information Technology, Institute of Social Technology, Suranaree University of Technology. Her research interest includes knowledge organization and representation, metadata schema design and development, ontology development and user interfaces design for digital libraries, digital archives, digital museums, and cultural heritage. She worked as project manager to develop a digital collection of Northeastern Thai palm leaf manuscript at Khon Kaen University which is a part of Southeast Asia Digital Library Grant of the US Department of Education and administered through Northern Illinois University Library in order to create the Southeast Asia Digital Library (2005-2008). She is now SUT/IT representative on the Consortium of iSchools Asia Pacific.

Shigeo Sugimoto, Graduate School of Library, Information and Media Studies, University of Tsukuba

Dr. Sugimoto got Ph.D, ME and BE degrees from Kyoto University in information science in 1985, 1979 and 1977, respectively. He joined University of Library and Information Science in 1983 and has been working as a faculty member at ULIS and GSLIMS since then. (GSLIMS was launched in 2002 by the merger of ULIS and University of Tsukuba.) His research interest includes metadata technologies for digital libraries and Internet, digital archives, metadata schema interoperability and reuse, metadata for accessibility. He is a member of the board of trustees and the advisory board of Dublin Core Metadata Initiative. He has served as committee member for major digital library conferences in North America (JCDL), Europe (ECDL) and Asia (ICADL). He is a program co-chair of ICADL 2006 and JCDL 2007.He is now the Chair of CiSAP, and Vice Chair of International Conference on Asian Digital Libraries (ICADL).